Forbes ME: Companies need to realize importance of data to biz media

Brian Pittman of Bulldog Reporter’s IR Alert interviewed Carl Lavin, the managing editor of Forbes, about the future of business journalism and how that interacts with companies.

Here is an excerpt:

What developments do you see transforming the financial and business press now that IR professionals and financial communicators need to be aware of?

One big one is data. In our business, but also in every business, there is an overwhelming amount of data available these days. There will be an exponential increase in data available—to analyze businesses, to compare them to model future activity and so on. The people with the tools and personnel that can mine business data for intelligence will be adding tremendous value. As newsrooms, we will continue to do that. We’ll be more aggressive in that. For example, we [at Forbes] rank companies not just on sales metrics, but also on performance metrics. Our ability to do that will only increase as data is more available.

Telling stories is now more than the old fashioned interview of 12 people and distilling it and turning it into a story. Instead, there are all sorts of presentations that tell stories in layers with visuals—and presentations of data that are live and dynamic are a part of that.

If the company is not working to make this information available and accessible and with API (application programming interface) keys that others can use, then they will be left to the winds and whims of other people who will extract it. So make that available in IR sites. API allows you to give other programmers access to your data and information.

Read more here.